How to Find the Last Day of a Month in MySQL

Problem

You’d like to get the date of the last day of the month for a date in a MySQL database.

Example

Our database has a table named car_sales with data in the columns id, make, model, and sale_date.

For each car, let’s get the make and model and the last day of the month in which the car was sold. (The last day of the month is one of the terms of the transaction settlement.)

Solution

We’ll use the LAST_DAY() function. Here’s the query you’d write:

SELECT 
  make,
  model,
  LAST_DAY(sale_date) AS sale_last_day
FROM car_sales;

Here’s the result of the query:

Discussion

Use the LAST_DAY() function if you want to retrieve the last day of the month for a date in MySQL. This function takes one argument – the date, either as an expression returning a date/datetime/timestamp value or the name of a date/datetime/timestamp column. In our example, we use the sale_date column. It’s of the date data type.

LAST_DATE() returns the last day of the month of a given date. In our example, the last day of the month when the Ford Ka was sold is 2019-02-28; the car sold on 2019-02-01, and the last day of February 2019 was 2019-02-28.